3.2. GAS

3.2.1. Where to find it

Find it at the same place where you've found GCC, in the binutils package.
The latest version of binutils is available from
http://sources.redhat.com/binutils/.

3.2.2. What is this AT&T syntax

Because GAS was invented to support a 32-bit unix compiler, it uses standard
AT&T syntax, which resembles a lot the syntax for standard m68k assemblers,
and is standard in the UNIX world. This syntax is neither worse, nor better
than the Intel syntax. It's just different. When you get used to it, you find
it much more regular than the Intel syntax, though a bit boring.

Here are the major caveats about GAS syntax:

Register names are prefixed with %, so that registers are
%eax, %dl and so on, instead of just
eax, dl, etc. This makes it possible to
include external C symbols directly in assembly source, without any risk of
confusion, or any need for ugly underscore prefixes.

The order of operands is source(s) first, and destination last, as opposed to the
Intel convention of destination first and sources last. Hence, what in Intel
syntax is mov eax,edx (move contents of register
edx into register eax) will be in GAS
syntax mov %edx,%eax.

The operand size is specified as a suffix to the instruction name. The suffix
is b for (8-bit) byte, w for (16-bit)
word, and l for (32-bit) long. For instance, the correct
syntax for the above instruction would have been
movl %edx,%eax. However, gas does not require strict
AT&T syntax, so the suffix is optional when size can be guessed from
register operands, and else defaults to 32-bit (with a warning).

Immediate operands are marked with a $ prefix, as in
addl $5,%eax (add immediate long value 5 to register
%eax).

Missing operand prefix indicates that it is memory-contents; hence
movl $foo,%eax puts the address of
variable foo into register %eax, but
movl foo,%eax puts the contents of
variable foo into register %eax.

Indexing or indirection is done by enclosing the index register or indirection
memory cell address in parentheses, as in
testb $0x80,17(%ebp) (test the high bit of the byte value
at offset 17 from the cell pointed to by %ebp).

Note: There are few programs which may help you to
convert source code between AT&T and Intel assembler syntaxes; some of the
are capable of performing conversion in both directions.

GAS has comprehensive documentation in TeXinfo format, which comes at least
with the source distribution. Browse extracted .info
pages with Emacs or whatever. There used to be a file named gas.doc or as.doc
around the GAS source package, but it was merged into the TeXinfo docs. Of
course, in case of doubt, the ultimate documentation is the sources themselves!
A section that will particularly interest you is
Machine Dependencies::i386-Dependent::

Again, the sources for Linux (the OS kernel) come in as excellent examples;
see under linux/arch/i386/ the following files:
kernel/*.S, boot/compressed/*.S,
math-emu/*.S.

If you are writing kind of a language, a thread package, etc., you might as
well see how other languages (
OCaml,
Gforth, etc.), or thread packages (QuickThreads, MIT pthreads,
LinuxThreads, etc), or whatever else do it.

Finally, just compiling a C program to assembly might show you the syntax for
the kind of instructions you want. See section above.

3.2.3. Intel syntax

Good news are that starting from binutils 2.10 release, GAS supports Intel
syntax too. It can be triggered with .intel_syntax
directive. Unfortunately this mode is not documented (yet?) in the official
binutils manual, so if you want to use it, try to examine
http://www.lxhp.in-berlin.de/lhpas86.html, which is an extract from AMD
64bit port of binutils 2.11.

3.2.4. 16-bit mode

Binutils (2.9.1.0.25+) now fully support 16-bit mode
(registers and addressing) on i386 PCs. Use
.code16 and .code32 to switch
between assembly modes.

Also, a neat trick used by several people (including the oskit authors) is to
force GCC to produce code for 16-bit real mode, using an inline assembly
statement asm(".code16\n"). GCC will still emit only 32-bit
addressing modes, but GAS will insert proper 32-bit prefixes for them.

3.2.5. Macro support

GAS has some macro capability included, as detailed in the texinfo docs.
Moreover, while GCC recognizes .s files as raw assembly
to send to GAS, it also recognizes .S files as files
to pipe through CPP before feeding them to GAS. Again and again, see Linux
sources for examples.

GAS also has GASP (GAS Preprocessor), which adds all the usual macroassembly
tricks to GAS. GASP comes together with GAS in the GNU binutils archive. It
works as a filter, like and . I
have no idea on details, but it comes with its own texinfo documentation,
which you would like to browse (info gasp), print, grok.
GAS with GASP looks like a regular macro-assembler to me.